Health
Pieter Van Gorp
Director of the Dutch EngD program on Clinical Informatics
Pieter Van Gorp works as an associate professor in Information Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE).
His own research line focuses on digital health platforms. Besides that, he has managed the program of health data science within the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI) from 2017 to 2023. Since 2023, he is serving as the scientific director of the Dutch EngD program on Clinical Informatics.
His research on digital health platforms covers engineering topics like workflow management and privacy-by-design, typically with the aim to promote long-term engagement. Since 2015, he is leading GameBus, delivering a playful and data-driven app suite that engages families and friends to a healthier lifestyle. Regarding workflow management, he has contributed to Tracebook, a dynamic checklist support system. He has also studied transformations and analyses for advanced process models (among others in relation to protocol compliance).
Regarding privacy-by-design, Van Gorp has performed research on MyPHRMachines and he has supported a Personal Health Record (PHR) scale-up via a one-year sabbatical. Finally, Van Gorp has always been a strong proponent of open science (as illustrated by his work on SHARE.)
Abstract of Keynote Speech
25. 10. 2023
8-year Evaluation of GameBus: Status quo in Aiming for an Open Access Platform to Prototype and Test Digital Health Apps
According to Toli and Murtagh[1], smart cities are about urban transformations aimed at achieving a more environmentally sustainable city with a higher quality of life, offering opportunities for economic growth for all of its citizens, but with respect to the particularities of each locality and its existing inhabitants. Changes to urban infrastructure can already promote environmental sustainability as well as improve the well-being of citizens: for example, providing more urban green and more options for active transportation can be very helpful. However, the ultimate success depends directly on the behavior of urban inhabitants. A variety of technologies has emerged for promoting behavior change in the context of environmental sustainability and health, but the scientific evidence on the optimal use of such technologies remains too meager. In this keynote of the SmartCity360 Health Track, I will focus on our experiences related to the theory and data-enabled promotion of healthy behaviors. In particular, I will talk about GameBus, a web platform for increasing the rigor of gamified health experiments in living lab settings. I will clarify the scientific design rationale of this platform and provide an 8-year evaluation of its performance. GameBus has already supported a large variety of studies on gamified health promotion, leading to a promising data set for analyzing the impact of specific gamification techniques in specific contexts. While various articles on such studies have been published, along with data sets, I will share novel information to enable other scholars to scale up such efforts, building on a recent publication at the 2023 edition of the SIGCHI symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems[2]. I will also reflect critically on the role we have taken as a knowledge institute. For that, I will clarify the way we are collaborating with governmental and industrial partners and I will provoke discussion on alternative means of collaboration. This will serve as input to the panel discussion further down the Smart Life Summit conference program.